In an interview with Cointelegraph, Evan Duffield, the founder and lead developer of the Dash Project, revealed that Dash (formerly known as Darkcoin) had successfully struck a deal with Lamassu ATM who are now going to offer Dash along with Bitcoin in their ATMs.
Lamassu owns about 40% of all Bitcoin ATMs and is the leader in BTM business with 26% of the market share in BTMs.
Evan Duffield said:
“We’re really happy to announce that the Dash project is going to be the first alternative to Bitcoin to be supported by the Lamassu ATM project. This is really exciting, because the Lamassu ATM project has about 150 ATMs all around the world. We will be exclusively offered on their platform alongside Bitcoin.”
Co-founder of Deginner, Ira Miller, who has been in the Bitcoin space since 2011 was the key to negotiating this deal. Evan Duffield added:
“We’ve managed to negotiate this deal by forming a strategic partnership with Deginner. Ira Miller, the founder of Deginner has a team with a great deal of experience developing for the Lamassu system.”
Deginner is an open source software development team focussed on decentralised technology and public blockchains.
However, Evan refused to comment when asked about the potential that Lamassu might have seen in Dash to strike this deal. Although, he further added “I believe they try to be supportive of the whole cryptocurrency space and were happy to merge the changes to their ATM if we could find someone capable of implementing the changes required.”
When asked what else is new at Dash, Evan said that ‘Dash Evolution’ is the next generation of the Dash project and is going to provide a new user-friendly experience.
Evan Duffield is to give a presentation on 22nd January 2016, Friday, in Miami, where he is expected to provide the prototype and other relevant information about what is going to be implemented in ‘Dash Evolution’.
Cointelegraph reached out to some experts for comments on this story.
“From the ALT coins perspective, having an ATM handle it gives it more credibility,” commented Eric Grill, the CEO of CoinOutlet Inc. But from the ATM operations standpoint, he thinks that while the idea might sound ambitious, it doesn’t work. He said:
“We offered Litecoin, Dogecoin on our machine and it confused the users. It’s very easy to add other alt coins on our machines but the user experience is impacted. Bitcoin is confusing enough for new users but when you start adding other coins on the machine it led to more confusion. The primary purpose of the ATM is to convert Fiat into Cryptocurrency, once you have your crypto currency it’s very easy to exchange it for other currencies online.”